


monster

by peradi



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, Gore, Kidnapping, Kilgrave is a monster, Pain, happy ever after of a sort, hurt and comfort -- sort of, if you don't like trish we can't be friends, mentions of child abuse, non graphic sexual assault, ordinary humans being awesome and scary is my favourite thing, sanity slippage, trish is badass, trish is terrifying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-05 06:52:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5365508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peradi/pseuds/peradi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remember the original telling of Snow White? The stepmother dances herself to death in hot iron shoes. </p><p>This is that. Sort of. There is something red and hungry inside Trish Walker. She's survived worse than Kilgrave, and even as he pulls her into Hell she holds tight to this truth: she wants to live. </p><p>(or: Trish teaches people how to dance. It goes better for some than for others)</p>
            </blockquote>





	monster

 

“How about a smile?” says Kilgrave, and a beautiful smile blooms on Jessica’s face and that’s it, it’s over, it’s done.

Trish wants to scream and cry and beat the ground until her knuckles split open, wet and raw and leaking, she wants blood -- hers or his, she’s not fussed -- she wants justice, vengeance, anything.

But she can’t even move. She must stand there at attention, as tears roll down her cheeks, because that wasn’t an order.

 

\--

 

It wasn’t an order; it was a test.

Jessica Jones failed.

 

\--

 

Not an order. A request. A question. And the light faded from his eyes, the giddiness turned to venom, and he barked out --

“Patsy! Gouge out your eyes!” and Trish’s hands fly to her face, fingers curled and --

“No, wait! Changed my mind! On the boat, go the bedroom, if I’m not there in five minutes gouge out your eyes and pull out your teeth and beat yourself to death with your own shoes,” and Trish is weeping now, choking and coughing, but her legs obey -- marionette things, that is what he has made her -- and she must obey, she has no choice but to obey; and so she doesn’t even look at Jess as she walks aboard.

(the water, below her, is irondark and inviting. It is freedom. But it is forbidden -- and even if it were not, she would not jump, for Trish wants to live. Even if it is in torture. Even if it is in Hell.)

 

\--

 

The words designed to hurt: bedroom.

 

\--

 

Trish is not Trish, she is Patsy, and she is five.

Her legs ache. Her toes are bleeding. The backs of her thighs are striped with fire, for every time she plonks one foot down clumsily -- or wrong -- her mother lashes a plastic ruler across the tender skin there.

“Higher,” says Dorothy. “Get it right Patsy, the audition is in a week -- if you keep getting the steps wrong you’ll be too hurt to try out, and you don’t want that do you?”

Never mind that the reason she’ll be too hurt is the ruler, the fall of it, snap-slap of acrylic on soft skin.

Never mind that.

Feet higher. Legs higher. Dance Patsy, _dance._

 

\--

 

Three days into the voyage, and Trish is permitted to leave the bedroom. She thinks of her mother again, the fall of the ruler, the bruises that spread like fungus or rot -- black and purple, a frill of red scabs --  and rubs her fingers absently on the fresh marks there, bitten in, fingerprints this time. They don’t hurt half as much as the ruler did, once upon a time, but the pain goes deeper -- to a place inside her that’s never been struck before, and she feels empty and hollow as a grave.

No. Not empty and hollow, not quite, for inside her there is something red and it is alive and twisting and spinning, eating at her guts and raking red claws down her ribs. She can’t think of a name for it, but she holds onto it, this strange red parasite that is trying to devour her from the inside-out -- for the pain of it is not the pain of her thighs (or those places deep within) it is something else, something clean and sharp, something healthy and organic, like the aftermath of a good training

_(dance)_

session, like the feeling her whole body was suffused by as she learned Krav Maga. She can’t name it, not really, but she grips it tight as a half-formed child

_(god no do not let me --)_

_(she tells herself: within you there is a coil and it’s made of copper and it will not fail.)_

_(she tells herself: you are not Hope.)_

So. Inside her is something alien and red, and her thighs hurt and she’s bleeding -- a sluggish trickle -- but she can deal with that, with all of that, because Kilgrave is not as bad as her mother, because Kilgrave is and always be a monster; and her mother was not meant to be a monster but was.

Do you see the difference?

 

\--

 

The fourth day comes, and he permits her onto the deck. He holds her, his long fingers nudging the flat planes of her stomach, and he bites her earlobe.  

“Tell me you want me,” says he.

“I want you,” says Trish.

The thing about being under his control: when he tells you what you want, it becomes what you want.

He says: you want me.

And she does. She does. Every cell within her craves, screams for his touch, her skin itches -- almost sloughs off the bone -- with want, and if he is not there to hold her together she will crumble to dust, to a puddle of fleshy ruin.

But there’s still that red animal within her. He bends her over on the deck, and she wants him so badly she cannot breathe, he whispers into the shell of her ear as he’s inside her -- _you want, you want_ \-- and she does, she wants so much, she is nothing but _want_ \--

Except. There’s something within her, behind her ribs and curled about her heart, something red and scaled and furious.

She cannot name it. She’s just aware of it there, and it hurts-- she wishes that he could crush it to nothing, quell the fire and the hurt, for it feels like it’s gnawing on her liver, rending her marrow to slurry.

When he comes, he does not say her name. That should pain her but he is all she wants, and she only wants to please him, yes, yes, that is it; she is nothing but a shell for his desires, to be filled as he pleases and -- what are the words he said? -- plaything, slave --

(doll?)

\-- anyway. She’s whatever he needs, and that is good.

He pushes his nose into the hollow (hollow? has she not been eating?) above her collarbone, pants there, his breath congealing on her skin

(she wants to kill him)

(no she doesn’t)

and he whispers, “You’re mine. Say it.”

“You’re mine,” she says, blind obedience, and that’s when he slaps her, hard and fast on the mouth and that red thing inside her grips all the tighter and it hurts more than the slap.

_(My mother used to --)_

_(the ruler. My thighs. Dance, Patsy, dance --)_

“Don’t be insolent.”

She doesn’t know what he wants. If he were to tell her the rules she could learn them, follow them, keep herself safe --

But that’s not how it works. There are no rules.

He’s still inside her. He bucks his hip forwards, to make a point, but she doesn’t cry out and his forehead furrows.

“Am I hurting you? Tell the truth. Don’t say anything but the truth.”

“You’re not as bad as the one before,” says Trish-who-was-once-Patsy. Her lips are cut and bleeding, and there’s a single bead of red on her chin, and he licks it off.

“Tell me about him.” says Kilgrave.

Not a him, thinks Trish. But he said the truth, nothing but the truth, help you God -- and so she says, “They hurt me,” and it is the truth and that animal, that red-furred monster in her chest, it howls.

 

\--

 

It’s a week. Maybe longer. She can’t tell. They leave the sea, and he speaks on the phone to Jessica -- and then one day he comes back with hair dye, tells her to ‘use it’ and so she does, and her hands are tarblack and her hair black as night by the time she’s done, and he takes her from behind and partway through he utters this high, ugly cry and shoves her away.

“Fucking bitch,” and maybe he’s talking to her, and maybe he isn’t.

The next day, he brings bleach.

The chemical burns take near a month to heal, and the scars will remain longer.

 

\--

 

Trish remembers.

She is Patsy again, and her mother tells her to dance.

She’s twelve. Her breasts bud on her ribcage and Dorothy tuts at them, pinches the flesh an inch below her nipples, twists. “These are too big,” she says, “Patsy isn’t meant to be a sex icon -- not yet anyway.”

Bare-chested and shuddering with the hot sickly flush of shame, all Patsy can do is stare straight ahead as Dorothy assesses her.

“I said dance,” she says, flatly.

“Mom --”

“I need to say if those -- those _udders_ you’ve got will damage the steps,” says Dorothy.

Patsy lifts her arms up. She totters through the steps, childishly working her feet to and fro, and her left breast is a starpoint of pain -- but she ignores it, because she is Patsy, because she is hair the colour of blood and she is a star.

(An interesting fact about stars: they burn bright, bright, bright, and then they collapse in on themselves and everything around them is pulled in tight, and everything collapses to darkness and to dust.)

 

\--

 

It’s been about two months, and he takes her dancing.

“I wish you hadn’t made me do that to your face,” says Kilgrave. His arm is a ridge of steel at her back, and the ballroom is devoid of people.

(That’s not really true. They stand at the edges, shaking with fear, but Trish has been told to ‘dance like no one’s watching you’ so she does not see them.)

There’s a wrinkle of scartissue at her temple. Another crawls along her jawline.

“Jessica is still looking for you,” says Kilgrave. “I keep running into her.”

Trish knows. Trish knows because Kilgrave orders her to stay on the bed, sitting poised and naked -- _draw me like one of your French girls_ \-- for hours and hours, for days sometimes, and when he returns he makes her clean up all the waste, all the ruined sheets --

(hands bare. And then he makes her shower in scalding water, scrub herself down and then he --)

As they dance, Trish thinks of water.

He has not ordered her to think of anything -- sometimes he does, and that is a new and terrible sort of madness -- but now her thoughts are, more or less, her own and so she thinks of the roil of the tide under her feet as she climbed into the boat two months or so ago, she thinks of the iron-black swell, the frigid cold. She thinks of drowning, ice fingers prising her lungs open and filling her up with dark. She thinks that inside her is something living and scarlet and hungering.

She does not want to die. Even now. Even when he makes her dance until her feet bleed -- he sits on the floor, cross-legged like a child -- and she does the dance routine from the Patsy Walker show until her soles start to fall off.

The pain is huge. The pain is a nova, a fire; the thing inside her reaches up towards it, glad and greedy for company.

Trish thinks she is going mad.

There is pain. There is red. There is not blackness -- and she remembers how Jessica used to get drunk and tell her of a blackness filled with pinpricks of light that swelled within her skull, how his orders left her room to think and how she would think of (long for) death.

Trish thinks: the space within me is red.

Trish thinks: Jessica Jones is very different from me.

 

\--

 

She spends a month or so with her feet in an igloo of bandages, waiting for the skin grafts to take, waiting to heal.

Kilgrave is tiring of her. He gets a doctor to treat her, but this is only because she is the best bait he has. He still wants Jessica.

He only wants Jessica.

He tells her _you want me only me_ and _you can’t sleep until I return_ and then he leaves her for a week.

She spends the first three days fretting, weeping, screaming his name until her throat is scraped raw.

But then the orders fade away, and the redness returns.

She knows that the security guards are under strict instruction -- some will have been commanded, some paid, some both -- but none will let her leave. She knows that her feet are still too damaged to carry her in a lengthy flight.

She knows that she could kill herself, if she wanted to.

Knot the sheets, Hang herself. Smash the mirror, cut her throat -- just like Hope did, all those days ago --  or just bash her head open on the wall. She’s seen people do it, seen Kilgrave make people do it; he made her watch.

But she doesn’t.

She sits on the bed, her pale legs folded beneath her, kneeling like a student at a dojo -- and she remembers.

 

\--

 

Last year. Her tutor. Krav Maga. Her body, once soft and fragile and oh-so breakable, now hardening. Her hands are blades, Her feet are knives. Every part of her is a weapon. Everything works with the slick efficiency of a machine.

What did he say?

Why is it so important that she remembers his words before the start of a training session?

Her legs ache. Her thighs are mottled purple and red.

( _why must she -_ -)

She cannot grip the trails of memory. She is starving. Her throat is gluey. Her insides knot in on themselves, striving to digest something, anything.

The feral red animal inside her rears it’s head.

She can name it now. It is fury, it is fire, and it is -- above else -- the desire to live.

She is Trish Walker, she is alive, and her heart beats hot and heavy in her chest.

It snarls the answer into her ears.

“Let’s dance,” and that’s what he said, the tutor, the slick and muscled tutor, the man who taught her how to disarm an assailant, how to fight -- how to ensure that no one, no one, ever touched her again.

 

\--

 

He returns, and presents her with a feast.

“Eat all you want,” he says, and she does -- and, of course, she vomits.

“Waste of good food,” he says. “But I’m feeling generous. You can have another go at eating.”

She makes towards the table --  a table laden with roast chicken, stuffing, dumplings, trifle and cake, smelling like Heaven -- but his hand on her shoulder stops her.

“Not that. I said you could have another go. _With the food you first tried_.”

 

\--

 

“You taste of vomit. Go brush your teeth until I say you can stop.”

She does so, until her saliva swills milky pink down the sink, and then he pulls her into bed, makes her ride him until he is slack and boneless and smiling.

“Jessica’s stopped looking for you. Believe me. Cry. Tell me you hate her. Tell me you want her dead.”

 

\--

 

The next day he tells her to dance until he returns.

She does.

But the red thing in her chest reminds her that there are many different ways to dance, and so she shadowboxes for days, fighting imaginary opponents, dreams of noses breaking under her fists; and Jess is no longer looking for her

( _purple edged vision -- what does that mean, purple not red, purple not black_ )

but the redness, the red animal, that remembers.

 

\--

 

Kilgrave has told her that she will not recognise Jessica when she sees her, to which Trish responds --

“Who’s Jessica?”

 

\--

 

In a church, with the sad dark eyes of a stranger on her, Kilgrave tells Trish to dance with him.

The red beast howls in joy.

Trish dances.

 

\--

 

This is what Patsy knows: you must enunciate. Press tongue to teeth, let your words ring clear.

This is what Trish knows: you can break a man’s jaw with the thrust of your palm, as long as you have enough power behind the blow. A man with a broken jaw cannot speak, especially if you angle the blow so that his teeth trap his tongue and bite it in half, leaving the tip to flounder like a limbless insect, letting his blood flow thick and heavy down his throat, drowning him.

This is what Patsy knows: dancing is very important. You must do it when you are commanded.

This is what Trish knows: dancing comes in many variants.

This is what Trish has been commanded: dance.

This is what Kilgrave does not know: Trish.

 

\--

 

He dies as Trish has lived: in red.

Jessica has to grab her wrists to make her stop hitting him. Trish’s fingers flex open, tacky with blood, and that red animal -- the desire to live, her fury and her anger, her beauty and her power -- takes ahold of her mouth and she starts to wail, screaming high and wild, but it doesn’t speak of loss, not in the slightest.

It’s a scream of pure, primal victory -- and it does not stop for a long time.

 

\--

 

A year later, and Trish takes Jessica dancing.

They hold hands. Jess fits into the swell of Trish’s body like she was born to occupy that space.

“Here,” says Trish. The red thing is within her still, kept caged by bonds of love and sisterhood and life, but once born it can never fade. Trish understands Simpson better than she ever wanted to, and she knows that the impulsion to hit and to keep hitting -- when someone looks at Jess wrong, when someone calls her name in the street -- will never leave her, not really.

The red animal within her is fury and madness, and without it she would have died -- and now she must live with it.

Still.

“Let me show you the steps,” she says. The woman who followed her across the world, who loves her more than stars and oceans -- who has  a skull once filled with blackness, and who is more than a little in awe of Trish -- leans against her, and _smiles_.

  



End file.
